The Last Two Centuries of Global Governance

In: Global governance: a review of multilateralism and international organizations, Band 21, Heft 2

Abstract

In recent essays, Thomas Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson argue that analysis of systems of global governance going back to the beginnings of the earliest state systems could provide fundamental insight into the problems that trouble the scholarly field of international relations today. While no social scientist or historian is yet able to give a credible account of global governance over those many millennia, it is possible to begin to recount the history of global governance far back beyond the events with which scholars of international relations begin, 1945, the end of World War II and the founding of the postwar UN system - as Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch do in their essay in this issue of Global Governance - to provide valuable insights for contemporary global governance. An even more reasonable date for the beginning of the contemporary system of global governance would be 1815. The associated events were the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of a system of governance of Europe and its empires that eventually led to the global system that we now have. The conservative governments that held the congress created many of the institutions that still characterize global governance and gave new life to older institutions and practices whose sources and consequences were central to the nineteenth-century interimperial organizations out of which the United Nations grew. Many of the goals of the interimperial system - the economic goals as well as the goal of universalizing and perfecting the state system - also are still with us. Moreover, the constitutional dynamics of the nineteenth-century system - the forces that led to change within international governance - remain the same. Attention to those dynamics can, as Weiss and Wilkinson would suggest, help us understand the prospects for ameliorating current global problems, including problems that could not have been anticipated two centuries ago. Adapted from the source document.